Film review: Del Toro's unconventional romance with a message of civil rights

By Jake Wilson

19 January 2018 — 12:15am

The Shape of Water ★★★ (MA) 123 minutes

While as entertaining and skilfully crafted as usual for Guillermo del Toro, The Shape of Water is also typically paradoxical – an adult fairy-tale with the willed simplicity of a children's film, and a celebration of non-conformity that works overtime to gain our assent.

Fresh from playing the world's most devoted foster mother in Paddington 2, Sally Hawkins again shows her gift for pantomime as the mute heroine Elisa, employed as a cleaner at a high-security government laboratory in Baltimore about 1962.

A wallflower but not a pushover, Elisa gets by with the help of a couple of equally marginalised friends – her colleague Zelda (Octavia Spencer), who acts as her interpreter, and her roommate, Giles (Richard Jenkins), a gay commercial artist who rues having been born too early to have a chance of finding love.

Sally Hawkins plays a non-speaking woman named Elisa in The Shape of Water.

Photo: Matt

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Elisa likewise longs for a soulmate, and gets her wish under the strangest circumstances imaginable. At the lab one day, she learns of the presence of a humanoid amphibian (frequent Del Toro collaborator Doug Jones) who has been fished out of the Amazon and brought to Baltimore where he's kept in a tank for examination.

The Amphibian Man, as he's known in the credits, is a careful blend of the grotesque and the gorgeous, with dark oily skin, big gleaming eyes like marbles, and mottled patterns on his forehead in turquoise and gold. It's the start of a strange love story, though the Amphibian Man remains more a symbol than a fully-fledged character, with relatively little screen time considering his central role.

Meanwhile, the busy script by Del Toro and Vanessa Taylor braids together multiple subplots, introducing us to Zelda's husband, Brewster (Martin Roach), and following Giles' efforts to flirt with a friendly counterhand (Morgan Kelly) at his local pie shop.

Michael Shannon dominates many scenes as the sadistic Colonel Strickland, who regards the creature as his personal property – putting him at odds with his colleague Dr Hoffstetier (Michael Stuhlbarg), an eccentric scientist perhaps partly inspired by Eugene Levy in Splash.

Richard Jenkins as Giles and Sally Hawkins as Elisa in The Shape of Water.

Photo: Photo by Kerry Hayes

Notwithstanding the backdrop of Cold War intrigue, it's hard to miss the echoes of civil rights struggles not only in the 1960s but more recently. Still, the allegory has a wilfully tasteless side: not all couples who have fought for public acceptance would appreciate seeing their relationship equated, even jokingly, with one between a woman and a sea monster.

The truth seems to be that Del Toro is a filmmaker with a split personality, civic-minded and surrealist in equal measure. The Shape of Water is a preachy message movie, but also a zany mash-up in which a Fellini heroine falls for the Creature from the Black Lagoon.

It's not the kind of scenario typically found in a film greeted as a credible Oscar contender: Del Toro's willingness to court absurdity and bad taste serves to guarantee his integrity, proving he hasn't entirely gone respectable.

Designed in lusciously sickly greens, The Shape of Water can also be described as a dream that refers back mainly to itself, a hydraulic system of overdetermined metaphors. Elisa and Giles' leaky apartment is located above a cinema, suggesting how movies belong to the realm of the unconscious that lies beneath the waking mind like a hidden lake.

Pitted against the flowing nature of desire is the rigidity of Colonel Strickland, with his fixed scowl, perfectly coiffed hair and looming physique. His sadism has a sexual side, especially where Elisa is concerned: he likes the idea of a woman who can't talk back.

In one of Shannon's best scenes, Strickland blissfully allows himself to be sold a Cadillac, supposedly the car of the future. Here Del Toro's bent for symmetry genuinely complicates the film's meanings, allowing us to view the passion of a man for his vehicle as another unconventional romance.

Part of the film's argument is that "normality" does not exist, and that the more Strickland tries to prove his superiority over his rival, the more freakish he becomes in turn. Which of them, we are meant to wonder, is the real monster?

Once again, the irony goes both ways. We know how much Del Toro loves monsters – and it's safe to assume that even the cruel Strickland has a place near his creator's heart.